"Pay attention... pendulums on earth fall towards the EARTH, NOT THE SUN."
Like hell they don't. The sun is the most massive hunk of anything in the star system and its gravity, by definition, has an effect on everything. Accurately measure the period of that pendulum and you will find that it has a tendency to move faster during the night (earth and sun pulling in the same direction) as it does during the day (earth and sun pulling in opposite directions). The question this anomally brings up is how much faster?
After all, by your view of the solar system we shoudln't even have tides, since the oceans "fall towards the earth, not the sun" or the moon.
(Then there's the fact that we're all falling towards the sun. It's just that we keep missing.)
"They don't even want people directing traffic to their site."
IMO, DNS servers should whole-heartedly support this policy by not resolving the URL unless the requestor has provided, in writing, documentation that the link being followed is valid.
Who made the multi-million dollar investment to convince PC game companies to go online?
Why must the console manufacturer cater to game companies with such a primadonna attitude?
What happens when (not if) Sony and Microsoft tell their respective publishers that the honeymoon is now over and they expect no more subsidizing in the future? I'd wager this happens with the next generation of consoles.
Sega may be the only company with the 'cube online, but I suspect that not relying on Nintendo the way other publishers rely on Microsoft and Sony will give them a better footing in the long run, seeing as how they're already self-sufficient.
A new version of PSO I & II gets released stateside in a few days, by the way.
"Yet they have 60% of the car crash death rate per 10,000 cars as the US."
Simply because they own cars doesn't mean they drive them as often or as far as the typical American. After all, what's the average price of gasoline in Japan right now?
It'd be better to compare the crash death rate per car-kilometer, not just per car.
"As a Canadian, I've talked to many folks from the states over the Internet and trying to describe to them where I live is sometimes very difficult."
On the other hand, I, as an American, recall impressing a Canadian by being able to tell her what provice she lived in simply by knowing her time zone. YMMV.
What I love, though, is getting mail from, say, a European, and seeing what they do to the address. I sold something on eBay to somebody in the UK and had him mail me his payment. I was living in Louisiana at the time, I gave him my address, a week or so later his cheque shows up, and it turns out he took it upon himself to spell out "Los Angeles" instad of leaving it as "LA." Thank God for ZIP codes! And then he went and abbreviated "USA" as well, so he just couldn't win for losing.
(Me, I was an anal-retentive bastard who comfirmed his postcode with the Royal Mail's website before shipping his package to the "UNITED KINGDOM.")
Nowadays I simply include a note to international customers asking them not to spell out "Drive" or "Louisiana" and if possible to try to spell out "United States of America" on the envelope when I give them my address.
Because Cisco should be held accountable for the people that, for some unknown reason, accept packets for an interior routing protocol from an unknown exterior host?
What should the front page say? "Download this patch" or "Buy one of our firewall products?" "Send your IT person to our courses," perhaps? If their customer is running a gateway that listens to such ports on its external connections, it's going to take far more than this patch to secure their network.
This isn't Windows. Users aren't allowed to be idiots. Heck, might as well enable Telnet on your gateways while you're at it...
Which isn't much of an advantage when you think about it. Apart from generally being a hardware add-on (the number of people who own an Xbox and Live will always be a smaller subset of the number of peope who own an Xbox, so why focus on Sega CD^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLive when you can just publish for the vanilla Gen^H^H^HXbox?), they have also limited themselves to those people who happen to live in an area with a high enough population density to attract broadband providers. That might make economic sense in crowded downtown Seoul, but out here in suburban/rural America, where I have trouble getting a 33.6 connection...
"It is also unfortunate that Nintendo doesn't seem to see reason to persue online play for future games/consoles,"
I find this to be an interesting double standard. The hardware is there. GameCubes can get online or be set up in a LAN. It is there to take advantage of if the publishers so wish. But while it's OK for PC manufacturers (and even Apple) to simply provide the hardware and leave it at that, console manufacturers are expected to suck-up to the publishers by swallowing some of the networking set-up costs as well?
I suspect some game publishers are going to have a rude wake-up call one day when they realize that what Sony and Xbox are doing now is more or less simply an "introductory period" either by dropping such support or simply by jacking up the licensing fees for online games. I think this will probably happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 2 (or whatever they're eventually called).
"Weren't Nintendo the company that believed cartridges would never be replaced by CD-ROM's?"
Not quite. Nintendo is the company that employs Miyamoto, who more or less said:
Loading screens suck!
I make games, not movies!
The PlayStation may have earned more money, but I'd have to say that Nintendo won the philosophy war on this one. All three consoles have hardware that is still just as capable of outstripping the optical drive's ability to load data, and yet (good) game companies have been getting much better at hiding those annoying "Please Wait" screens. And even though most game companies have access to rendering hardware that will knock the socks off of anything you have connected to a TV (or your monitor, for that matter), I'm noticing a marked decline in pre-rendered movies in console games...
Besides, the N64 still made Nintendo money hand over fist, especially in North America. We should all make such "mistakes."
"Porting CD-ROM/DVD games from the PC to a console is going to require that amount of storage; either from DVD or broadband. So the console will require a system capable of reading DVD-ROM's."
Ports, shmorts. Gimme something original.
And, given the choice between a DVD-ROM drive and a drive with near-identical specifications and performance but without the anti-free-speech royalty payments associated with the acronym "DVD," I'd rather go for the latter. Especially when the latter also saves me money.
"A console system has to have an entertainment experience better than that of a PC, so you end up with a superset of PC features."
"Better" does not need to mean "inclusive." That's like saying a console will need to run Windows in order to compete with a PC.
Besides, I have yet to see a set of USB bongo drums or maracas, nor have I even seen a USB dance mat.
"and it allows the kids to record Cartoon Network without messing with the cable box/DVD player/remote controls in the living room,"
Except that your vision would more or less require that, since the console is also your cable box/DVD player/whatever. Or at least one of the 17 you have attached to the same TV, now that everything has to have a DVD drive built into it...
"After all, the number of transistors that can placed on silicon is doubling every 18 months."
Being able to do something alone isn't justification to do it.
"But gameboy won because it had Tetris. It had portable games."
IMO, part of why Game Boy has successfully trumped so many competitors is that they don't make "portable games." They make games that happen to be portable. While most other handhelds seem to take the stance of "Now you can play your favorite colsole game X on the road!" (with versions that often paled in comparison), most of my favorite 4-shade Game Boy games didn't really have console analogs, at least not initially. SaGa and Seiken Densetsu were re-branded in the US but didn't have anything in common with Final Fantasy beyond their new names. Gargoyle's Quest* went on to inspire sequels on the NES and SNES. Metroid II is just... well... Metroid II. And don't forget where Kirby got his start.
And with the Game Boy library maturing with the hardware itself, Sony and the PSP's publishers will have to try that much harder to be something far more than "the hand-held version of the PS2," I don't see much hope for it.
When the Super Game Boy came out for the SNES, relatively early in the Game Boy's life, people scoffed. "Game Boy is supposed to be portable! Why would I want to play portable games on my TV?" Things have continued to build, Nintendo has released their Game Boy Player for the GCN and people are no longer laughing. Forget about playing PlayStation One/2 games on your PSP, the PSP won't be able to succeed until people start to want to play PSP games on their PlayStation 3.
* Capcom was making noise at one point about an MMORPG based on the Ghouls & Ghosts & Goblins/Gargoyle's Quest/Demon's Crest universe. What happened to that?
"While part of that debt is indeed incurred by private organizations, so too is the country's GDP earned by private organizations."
But private organizations cannot simply tax the available GDP at whim (unless they're Microsoft) to cover debts. Governments don't borrow money against any future potential profits, they borrow it against their ability to take the money from their own tax-payers.
But if you'd rather talk national budgets, things get far uglier for Argentina:
Washington:
external debt--1.4e12 USD
revenues--1.946e12 USD
Buenos Aires
external debt--432.7e9 USD
revenues--44e9 USD
The US government took it slightly more than it owes foreign creditors, but the Argentine government took in only about 10% of what it owes externally.
What the national government specifically owes or spends is also important because it is the government that does any borrowing from the World Bank.
"The maximum useful lifespan of these is at MOST five years, which means any WMD's Iraq had in the gulf war in 1991 were USELESS by 1996."
Both you and the referred-to article rely on the assumption that no new agents were produced after 1991. They also had no ability to produce new ballistic missiles immediately after the first Gulf War, but that did not prevent them from rebuilding and developing new, infringing missile designs during the next decade. Why not chemical weapons?
"There was a WMD shell used in an attack against US troops a few months ago - they didn't die,"
But not because of the innefectiveness of the chemical. Some insurgents took an artillery shell (assuming it was a standard HE round) and made a roadside bomb with it. The artillery shell wasn't meant to be used in that manner. If used as intended, it would have been
spinning (the chemicals in the shell weren't sarin yet, the final mixing step was supposed to be performed by firing it out of a rifled artillery piece)
about 100 m over the ground (giving the agent time to disperse and have maximum effect on anybody on the ground)
The small explosive charge on the shell was only meant to break the casing, with most of the dispersal being done by the shell's intended spin.
As it was, it blew up stationary (no spin), on the ground (no altitude), in an attempt to disarm it (nobody else around). The chemicals were splashed out a bit with no effective mixing, so only trace amounts of actual sarin was produced (miligrams instead of the potential kilograms).
Since you referred to this elsewhere, I figure I should point out that you ought to read your own cut-and-paste.
"The data cover government and private bank debt owed to foreign investors, governments, banks and monetary authorities."
The government (read "your tax dollars") is not responsible for covering debts incurred by private organizations, even if they are financial institutions.
By the way, the parent's numbers seem to come from the CIA World Factbook.
The US is the third-most populated country on the world. Iraq doesn't even have 1/10 of the US population.
"No doubt, some are homeless and starving, etc. What does amnesty international have to say about that?"
Very little, as that isn't what Amnesty International is about. Their goal is to bring attention to government actions that are specifically designed to oppress and/or brutalize people, especially prisoners (hence the name). From their website:
In pursuit of this vision, AI's mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights.
"Is it because the US is *sanctioned*?"
No, it's because Amnesty International would much rather talk about the continued use of capital punishment in the US, as well as calling for the US to become a signatory to the International Court of Justice. They ain't exactly the US puppets you seem to think they are.
Satellites by definition have to obey Kepler's laws, which means where they are when is very predictable. This is why we still have spy planes.
Also, being able to track a truck has little (if anything) to do with knowing its contents. Those transporting sarin tend not to write "WMD" in big letters on top of the trailer. If anything, they're more likely to put a red crescent on the truck than anything else. This is why we need more human intelligence.
And finally, tracking something and being able to intercept it are two very different things. About the only thing US troops can do to effectively project force anywhere in Iraq right now is through airstrikes, which present new problems. Too little explosive and you have a lethal cloud of sarin wafting through the countryside. But if you use enough explosive to incinerate all the sarin, all anybody will find is a scorched piece of sheet metal with the aforementioned red crecent, which will be all over the news and convince well-intentioned locals to take up arms against the US. This is something that needs to be intercepted on the ground.
"How is it that we picked up individual "chemical weapon lab" trucks on satellite,"
Because ground intelligence was able to verify the contents of the truck beforehand, red-flagging the truck for special attention the the Reconnaisance Office.
"but missed the 370 trucks moving across the border? If they were spaced only 150 feet apart, the convoy would have stretched for more than ten miles! How did we miss that?"
Again, they tend not to write "WMD" on their trucks. Sarin is obviously not Iraq's only potential export, and it's easy enough to imagine a few "special" barrels of "oil" being shipped out here and there both in accordance with and against the Oil for Food program.
"But Sarin is not a liquid."
A weapon is all but useless if it isn't portable. Pretty much as a rule, chemical weapons are transported in liquid form and become a gas only upon use.
"and to put 2 tons of gas in compressed cylinders on a military truck would be quite a feat."
You're forgetting one of your gas laws. Why compress when you can chill?
And they wouldn't use military trucks.
"740 tons of 100 lb artillery shells is 14,800 rounds."
And you're assuming that 14,800 artillery shells is a non-negligible number of artillery shells for the former Iraqi army to have on hand.
"At 100 rounds/truck, you're still looking at 148 vehicles.
How did we miss that?"
Sit at any given point on a highway and count the number of trucks that pass by you during the course of any given day and you might have an idea.
" but rather that he tried too hard to be like the U.S. - a sovereign nation possessing weapons of strategic deterrence."
Except that the US doesn't have a consistent history of using such weapons both internationally and domesticly, doesn't have numerous UN resolutions against it, didn't have a statutory requirment to dispose of said weapons in a verifiable manor, etc.
Comparing Iraq and the US in that manner is like saying "Everybody else in the US can own a gun, why can't a convicted felon?"
Instead of air-conditioning a few cubic meters of air during the few hours of the year a Canadian city actually needs air conditioning (j/k), why not do something a little more useful with that temperature differential?
"The irony is that Argentina's debts, when the World Bank shat on them, were far less severe than the USA's."
In terms of absolute dollar figures, or in relative terms compared to national budget/GDP? Part of the reason the US has such large debts (and can get away with them for a time) is that it has so much money to play with to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
"Einstein once said something along the following lines: Testing theories is a very thankless task,"
Like "Mr. Gedanken Experiment" would know anything about that...
"Pay attention... pendulums on earth fall towards the EARTH, NOT THE SUN."
Like hell they don't. The sun is the most massive hunk of anything in the star system and its gravity, by definition, has an effect on everything. Accurately measure the period of that pendulum and you will find that it has a tendency to move faster during the night (earth and sun pulling in the same direction) as it does during the day (earth and sun pulling in opposite directions). The question this anomally brings up is how much faster?
After all, by your view of the solar system we shoudln't even have tides, since the oceans "fall towards the earth, not the sun" or the moon.
(Then there's the fact that we're all falling towards the sun. It's just that we keep missing.)
"They don't even want people directing traffic to their site."
IMO, DNS servers should whole-heartedly support this policy by not resolving the URL unless the requestor has provided, in writing, documentation that the link being followed is valid.
"We are Bord."
What, like there's some other reason for being at Slashdot?
"said the process yanks such slapstick performers as the Stooges out of the black-and-white universe they belong in."
I know of at one color movie they at least cameoed in. I wonder if that particular scene should be yanked and de-colorized?
"And yeah, the salespeople lie straight out about it. They claim it covers anything."
"Can you write that down here, along with your full name and employee number? Thanks."
"Microsoft is in to get into your bedroom as a multi-function entertainment machine"
Microsoft bought out Realdoll?
Who made the multi-million dollar investment to convince PC game companies to go online?
Why must the console manufacturer cater to game companies with such a primadonna attitude?
What happens when (not if) Sony and Microsoft tell their respective publishers that the honeymoon is now over and they expect no more subsidizing in the future? I'd wager this happens with the next generation of consoles.
Sega may be the only company with the 'cube online, but I suspect that not relying on Nintendo the way other publishers rely on Microsoft and Sony will give them a better footing in the long run, seeing as how they're already self-sufficient.
A new version of PSO I & II gets released stateside in a few days, by the way.
"not keeping "immoral" people off airplanes."
Moral, shmoral. All I know is that the guy has a history of DWI and manslaughter.
Of course, if he has problems with the systems he himself voted into place...
"Yet they have 60% of the car crash death rate per 10,000 cars as the US."
Simply because they own cars doesn't mean they drive them as often or as far as the typical American. After all, what's the average price of gasoline in Japan right now?
It'd be better to compare the crash death rate per car-kilometer, not just per car.
Well, you could mock him for this line right here:
"Personally, i can't afford to buy games i don't plan on buying."
"They make it sound as though Linux isn't really open source"
Perhaps they're covering their own asses until SCO's lawsuits get dismissed.
"As a Canadian, I've talked to many folks from the states over the Internet and trying to describe to them where I live is sometimes very difficult."
On the other hand, I, as an American, recall impressing a Canadian by being able to tell her what provice she lived in simply by knowing her time zone. YMMV.
What I love, though, is getting mail from, say, a European, and seeing what they do to the address. I sold something on eBay to somebody in the UK and had him mail me his payment. I was living in Louisiana at the time, I gave him my address, a week or so later his cheque shows up, and it turns out he took it upon himself to spell out "Los Angeles" instad of leaving it as "LA." Thank God for ZIP codes! And then he went and abbreviated "USA" as well, so he just couldn't win for losing.
(Me, I was an anal-retentive bastard who comfirmed his postcode with the Royal Mail's website before shipping his package to the "UNITED KINGDOM.")
Nowadays I simply include a note to international customers asking them not to spell out "Drive" or "Louisiana" and if possible to try to spell out "United States of America" on the envelope when I give them my address.
Because Cisco should be held accountable for the people that, for some unknown reason, accept packets for an interior routing protocol from an unknown exterior host?
What should the front page say? "Download this patch" or "Buy one of our firewall products?" "Send your IT person to our courses," perhaps? If their customer is running a gateway that listens to such ports on its external connections, it's going to take far more than this patch to secure their network.
This isn't Windows. Users aren't allowed to be idiots. Heck, might as well enable Telnet on your gateways while you're at it...
"I'm just curious, but: How many ways can you play football? How many different football games do you need?"
Do you want my answer, or EA's answer?
Ever take a look at the used Genesis game bins in your local game store?
"XBOX's advantage is Live."
Which isn't much of an advantage when you think about it. Apart from generally being a hardware add-on (the number of people who own an Xbox and Live will always be a smaller subset of the number of peope who own an Xbox, so why focus on Sega CD^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLive when you can just publish for the vanilla Gen^H^H^HXbox?), they have also limited themselves to those people who happen to live in an area with a high enough population density to attract broadband providers. That might make economic sense in crowded downtown Seoul, but out here in suburban/rural America, where I have trouble getting a 33.6 connection...
"It is also unfortunate that Nintendo doesn't seem to see reason to persue online play for future games/consoles,"
I find this to be an interesting double standard. The hardware is there. GameCubes can get online or be set up in a LAN. It is there to take advantage of if the publishers so wish. But while it's OK for PC manufacturers (and even Apple) to simply provide the hardware and leave it at that, console manufacturers are expected to suck-up to the publishers by swallowing some of the networking set-up costs as well?
I suspect some game publishers are going to have a rude wake-up call one day when they realize that what Sony and Xbox are doing now is more or less simply an "introductory period" either by dropping such support or simply by jacking up the licensing fees for online games. I think this will probably happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 2 (or whatever they're eventually called).
Not quite. Nintendo is the company that employs Miyamoto, who more or less said:
- Loading screens suck!
- I make games, not movies!
The PlayStation may have earned more money, but I'd have to say that Nintendo won the philosophy war on this one. All three consoles have hardware that is still just as capable of outstripping the optical drive's ability to load data, and yet (good) game companies have been getting much better at hiding those annoying "Please Wait" screens. And even though most game companies have access to rendering hardware that will knock the socks off of anything you have connected to a TV (or your monitor, for that matter), I'm noticing a marked decline in pre-rendered movies in console games...Besides, the N64 still made Nintendo money hand over fist, especially in North America. We should all make such "mistakes."
"Porting CD-ROM/DVD games from the PC to a console is going to require that amount of storage; either from DVD or broadband. So the console will require a system capable of reading DVD-ROM's."
Ports, shmorts. Gimme something original.
And, given the choice between a DVD-ROM drive and a drive with near-identical specifications and performance but without the anti-free-speech royalty payments associated with the acronym "DVD," I'd rather go for the latter. Especially when the latter also saves me money.
"A console system has to have an entertainment experience better than that of a PC, so you end up with a superset of PC features."
"Better" does not need to mean "inclusive." That's like saying a console will need to run Windows in order to compete with a PC.
Besides, I have yet to see a set of USB bongo drums or maracas, nor have I even seen a USB dance mat.
"and it allows the kids to record Cartoon Network without messing with the cable box/DVD player/remote controls in the living room,"
Except that your vision would more or less require that, since the console is also your cable box/DVD player/whatever. Or at least one of the 17 you have attached to the same TV, now that everything has to have a DVD drive built into it...
"After all, the number of transistors that can placed on silicon is doubling every 18 months."
Being able to do something alone isn't justification to do it.
"But gameboy won because it had Tetris. It had portable games."
IMO, part of why Game Boy has successfully trumped so many competitors is that they don't make "portable games." They make games that happen to be portable. While most other handhelds seem to take the stance of "Now you can play your favorite colsole game X on the road!" (with versions that often paled in comparison), most of my favorite 4-shade Game Boy games didn't really have console analogs, at least not initially. SaGa and Seiken Densetsu were re-branded in the US but didn't have anything in common with Final Fantasy beyond their new names. Gargoyle's Quest* went on to inspire sequels on the NES and SNES. Metroid II is just... well... Metroid II. And don't forget where Kirby got his start.
And with the Game Boy library maturing with the hardware itself, Sony and the PSP's publishers will have to try that much harder to be something far more than "the hand-held version of the PS2," I don't see much hope for it.
When the Super Game Boy came out for the SNES, relatively early in the Game Boy's life, people scoffed. "Game Boy is supposed to be portable! Why would I want to play portable games on my TV?" Things have continued to build, Nintendo has released their Game Boy Player for the GCN and people are no longer laughing. Forget about playing PlayStation One/2 games on your PSP, the PSP won't be able to succeed until people start to want to play PSP games on their PlayStation 3.
* Capcom was making noise at one point about an MMORPG based on the Ghouls & Ghosts & Goblins/Gargoyle's Quest/Demon's Crest universe. What happened to that?
But private organizations cannot simply tax the available GDP at whim (unless they're Microsoft) to cover debts. Governments don't borrow money against any future potential profits, they borrow it against their ability to take the money from their own tax-payers.
But if you'd rather talk national budgets, things get far uglier for Argentina:
- Washington:
- external debt--1.4e12 USD
- revenues--1.946e12 USD
- Buenos Aires
- external debt--432.7e9 USD
- revenues--44e9 USD
The US government took it slightly more than it owes foreign creditors, but the Argentine government took in only about 10% of what it owes externally.What the national government specifically owes or spends is also important because it is the government that does any borrowing from the World Bank.
Both you and the referred-to article rely on the assumption that no new agents were produced after 1991. They also had no ability to produce new ballistic missiles immediately after the first Gulf War, but that did not prevent them from rebuilding and developing new, infringing missile designs during the next decade. Why not chemical weapons?
"There was a WMD shell used in an attack against US troops a few months ago - they didn't die,"
But not because of the innefectiveness of the chemical. Some insurgents took an artillery shell (assuming it was a standard HE round) and made a roadside bomb with it. The artillery shell wasn't meant to be used in that manner. If used as intended, it would have been
- spinning (the chemicals in the shell weren't sarin yet, the final mixing step was supposed to be performed by firing it out of a rifled artillery piece)
- about 100 m over the ground (giving the agent time to disperse and have maximum effect on anybody on the ground)
The small explosive charge on the shell was only meant to break the casing, with most of the dispersal being done by the shell's intended spin.As it was, it blew up stationary (no spin), on the ground (no altitude), in an attempt to disarm it (nobody else around). The chemicals were splashed out a bit with no effective mixing, so only trace amounts of actual sarin was produced (miligrams instead of the potential kilograms).
By the way, the parent's numbers seem to come from the CIA World Factbook.
According to another responder, yes.
"That much and then some die in the US yearly."
The US is the third-most populated country on the world. Iraq doesn't even have 1/10 of the US population.
"No doubt, some are homeless and starving, etc. What does amnesty international have to say about that?"
Very little, as that isn't what Amnesty International is about. Their goal is to bring attention to government actions that are specifically designed to oppress and/or brutalize people, especially prisoners (hence the name). From their website: "Is it because the US is *sanctioned*?"
No, it's because Amnesty International would much rather talk about the continued use of capital punishment in the US, as well as calling for the US to become a signatory to the International Court of Justice. They ain't exactly the US puppets you seem to think they are.
"we can track individual trucks by satellite."
Satellites by definition have to obey Kepler's laws, which means where they are when is very predictable. This is why we still have spy planes.
Also, being able to track a truck has little (if anything) to do with knowing its contents. Those transporting sarin tend not to write "WMD" in big letters on top of the trailer. If anything, they're more likely to put a red crescent on the truck than anything else. This is why we need more human intelligence.
And finally, tracking something and being able to intercept it are two very different things. About the only thing US troops can do to effectively project force anywhere in Iraq right now is through airstrikes, which present new problems. Too little explosive and you have a lethal cloud of sarin wafting through the countryside. But if you use enough explosive to incinerate all the sarin, all anybody will find is a scorched piece of sheet metal with the aforementioned red crecent, which will be all over the news and convince well-intentioned locals to take up arms against the US. This is something that needs to be intercepted on the ground.
"How is it that we picked up individual "chemical weapon lab" trucks on satellite,"
Because ground intelligence was able to verify the contents of the truck beforehand, red-flagging the truck for special attention the the Reconnaisance Office.
"but missed the 370 trucks moving across the border? If they were spaced only 150 feet apart, the convoy would have stretched for more than ten miles! How did we miss that?"
Again, they tend not to write "WMD" on their trucks. Sarin is obviously not Iraq's only potential export, and it's easy enough to imagine a few "special" barrels of "oil" being shipped out here and there both in accordance with and against the Oil for Food program.
"But Sarin is not a liquid."
A weapon is all but useless if it isn't portable. Pretty much as a rule, chemical weapons are transported in liquid form and become a gas only upon use.
"and to put 2 tons of gas in compressed cylinders on a military truck would be quite a feat."
You're forgetting one of your gas laws. Why compress when you can chill?
And they wouldn't use military trucks.
"740 tons of 100 lb artillery shells is 14,800 rounds."
And you're assuming that 14,800 artillery shells is a non-negligible number of artillery shells for the former Iraqi army to have on hand.
"At 100 rounds/truck, you're still looking at 148 vehicles.
How did we miss that?"
Sit at any given point on a highway and count the number of trucks that pass by you during the course of any given day and you might have an idea.
" but rather that he tried too hard to be like the U.S. - a sovereign nation possessing weapons of strategic deterrence."
Except that the US doesn't have a consistent history of using such weapons both internationally and domesticly, doesn't have numerous UN resolutions against it, didn't have a statutory requirment to dispose of said weapons in a verifiable manor, etc.
Comparing Iraq and the US in that manner is like saying "Everybody else in the US can own a gun, why can't a convicted felon?"
Instead of air-conditioning a few cubic meters of air during the few hours of the year a Canadian city actually needs air conditioning (j/k), why not do something a little more useful with that temperature differential?
"The irony is that Argentina's debts, when the World Bank shat on them, were far less severe than the USA's."
In terms of absolute dollar figures, or in relative terms compared to national budget/GDP? Part of the reason the US has such large debts (and can get away with them for a time) is that it has so much money to play with to begin with.